A Standing Rib Roast Saga

Roast beef was the traditional Christmas dinner in my family growing up, and I continue to love it. This recipe—by meat maven Bruce Aidells and his wife, Nancy Oakes, the chef at San Francisco’s Boulevard—advises you to “buy the best meat you can afford.” But here’s a thing about standing rib roasts: at a certain price point beef starts making its own rules..

I was determined to make this meal an occasion, so I went to Star Meats, where Jesse set me up with an organic, grass-fed Marin Sun Farms dry-aged, four-rib roast. At approximately nine pounds—at close to twenty dollars a pound—well, you can do the math. I had just bought the best beef I couldn’t afford. Suddenly, just inviting the in-laws didn’t seem important enough. Maybe I could make them put on evening wear.

A LITTLE BEEF BACKGROUND
All beef is aged—anywhere from one to three weeks on average—but most of it is what they call “wet aged,” packed in a sealed plastic pouch. This allows the meat to develop tenderness, but it does nothing in particular for the flavor. When meat is dry-aged, in addition to becoming more tender, it loses moisture, which concentrates and deepens the flavor in marvelous ways. In the process it loses mass, and the exposed portions are all trimmed away before cooking, demanding a higher price-per-pound. It’s no wonder that more-economical wet-aging has taken over the market.

This beef was, as Jesse casually put it “pretty epic.” Michael Boyd of Star had carefully hand-trimmed it, separated it from the ribs (which were also trimmed, on the underside), and tied whole business together again. In butcher shop terms, this qualified as spa treatment.

The rest of the story—at least up until the moment we sat down to eat—was sort of a disaster. I had the beef sitting in the fridge; all the ingredients were on hand; the date (my birthday, a Friday night) was set and my relatives would drive down to join us. Everything was set.

And then we all got the flu.

Our plans fell apart. The date was cancelled, the in-laws warded off, and the focus became just getting through the next few days. However, the beef—that really, really expensive, extraordinary, important piece of beef—was still sitting in the refrigerator. On Sunday I realized this was my last chance to cook the roast, dinner guests or not. There wouldn’t be enough time during the coming week.

Luckily, roast beef is not complicated to cook. You really need only prep it in chosen manner, pop it in the oven, and leave it to cook. The only challenging part is making sure you don’t cook it too much. As befits a Bruce Aidells recipe, the garlic/thyme/olive oil and kosher salt rub is simple and superb, a perfect base for a delicious, crusty exterior.

THE PORCINI AND BACON SAUCE
I was not as enamored of the bacon-porcini sauce, which (like Nancy Oakes’s excellent cioppino from earlier this year) bears the labor-intensive marks of a restaurant recipe adapted for the home kitchen. There’s so much prepping and boiling and chopping and reducing and straining and reducing involved, and I was barely up to the challenge. In addition, a dry-aged roast doesn’t exude a lot of moisture during the cooking, so there weren’t any pan juices, and the sauce may have suffered from the lack of them.

THE HORSERADISH/SOUR CREAM SAUCE
What the porcini sauce lacked was more than made up by the horseradish/sour cream sauce, which was phenomenal and easy (and a new permanent addition to any roasts in the future). Straining the horseradish concentrates the flavor and improves the texture; the sour cream adds a pleasant richness while tempering the heat of the horseradish. And shallots and chives make everything better.

THE POPOVERS
I usually make a yorkshire pudding with the flavorful beef drippings (my family goes nuts for popovers of any description), but I was a little dubious about these green onion/parmesan popovers. First of all, the batter doesn’t require a rest at room temperature, and baking in muffin tins (as this recipe dictates) can produce uneven results. So I hedged my bets a little.

I let the batter sit out for about an hour; I substituted the rendered beef fat from the roast for the butter, and as a final caution let the prepared muffin tins sit in the hot oven until the fat smoked to give things a good, heady start. Whether through the recipe itself or my modifications to it (or the combination of the two), the result was great; the popovers rose dramatically, browned and appetizing. The flavor was remarkable.

The beef was amazingly rare and tender, with a intense, deeply earthy flavor that put other roasts to shame. My only regret was that I was almost too worn out to enjoy it. Uncharacteristically, I only had one helping of this magnificent meal, and while my family tried their best, they weren’t feeling any better than I was.

But there’s a happy ending. Because we didn’t have company to share it, there was a lot of the roast left over, and it made phenomenal sandwiches over the following week. I even cut the ribs apart and gnawed them, which I usually don’t do. With a piece of beef this good-and this expensive-you have to do what it tells you.